I wanted to share some of the great projects that were presented during the workshop in the coming weeks. Today, I want to start with the work of Hasadna from Israel that Adam Kariv presented at last weeks OpenBudgets.eu Workshop.

Hasadna is the civic tech organization in Isreal, they have developed numerous apps, platforms and open source software to allow the public to engage with the Israeli government.

The obudget.org project visualizes the budget with interactive maps, where you can dive deeper into specific items to track changes in the budget and expenditure throughout the year.

Hasadna shines a light on budget processes and shows the spikes in budget changes throughout the year. These spikes are further investigated to uncover budget amendments to cover expenditures that politicians would prefer to keep hidden from the official budgets approved in parliament.

What I really like about the examples of Hasadna is that they do not only uncover and visualise the budget data, but that they follow the budget process. The budget and spending data is the first step, diving deeper into the budget process shows that yearly the budgets for some posts are
tremendously increased through the financial committee which has little parliamentary oversight.

Hasadna’s work shows that we have to widen our view to the entire budget cycle. I am curious to hear if others have also done work on mapping and visualising the budget cycle? Which peculiar examples of budget-spikes, or financial-committees etc. do we know from other countries?